As the homebuilding business has become more litigious, record keeping has become more important. The job log maintained by a lead carpenter or project superintendent can provide a reliable daily record of what actually happened, day to day, on a project, without relying on fuzzy memories after the fact. This record provides valuable information for settling disputes. But keeping a daily log can become cumbersome because it distracts key personnel from the more compelling work of building. This is why written construction logs are often sporadic and unreliable.
To ease the burden on my superintendents and myself, I supply key personnel with digital cameras and mini digital-cassette recorders. As work progresses, my guys take daily snapshots of the job in progress and dictate brief entries into the digital recorder. I exchange the memory chips weekly and download the files. To keep records straight, the recorder has four folders available at the touch of a button, A, B, C and D. Each folder corresponds to whatever job(s) the superintendent is working on. The pictures and voice files both have GPS location and date/time stamps for verification and legal validation.
I store the daily digital logs with the project calendar (I use Inloox for scheduling, and Inloox, like most scheduling programs, features document files where .jpg and .mp3 files can be archived).
Later on, these photographs and field memos provide a less burdensome and sometimes more accurate means to memorialize a job record. In the unlikely event that this documentation is needed to resolve a dispute, I print the photos and hire a legal secretary to transcribe the recordings.
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Sometimes I call my Olympus digital voice recorder my "prosthetic memory." I keep jobsite observations on folders B-through-S and my daily reminders and to-do items on the A folder. As the day progresses and items are added to the list, I record them. Every morning, I transcribe the list into my Outlook to-do list, which sinks up to my Windows phone (i-Guys do the same with their iMacs and iPads and iPhones), and voilà, I have my tasks set up for the day--now getting it all done, that's another story entirely!
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I supply key personnel with digital cameras, but smartphones or tablets could also do the job of the cameras and voice recorders we use.
